Abstract

There are a number of tools for extracting textual content on the Internet. Many of these tools were designed by researchers in the field of natural language processing, and are available as “packages”, which are sets of code files that developers have no trouble using but that may prove out of reach for laymen. Independent software solutions are few, and unlikely to satisfy the needs of researchers in the field of discourse analysis. In this article, we introduce a semi-automated, textual data extraction software, Le Détricoteur, which aims to meet the epistemological requirements of discourse analysis while also being accessible to non-specialist users who are not familiar with coding.